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Customer feedback may be negative, and we can focus on the mistakes we have made or things that our customers would like us to do better. However, we get far more Compliments than we do complaints or negative feedback. This feedback is important – to reassure us that we are doing a good job, and to praise staff. It is also a benchmark to help us improve and learn from our mistakes. We have written the Compliments, Comments and Complaints policy (334 kb) to help our staff deal with such feedback. You can also find our compliments, comments and complaints annual executive report fro 2015-16 here.

ComplimentsEveryone likes to be told they are doing a good job and staff at the Council are no exception. We would like you to tell us when we do something right, or if you're particularly pleased with any of our services. Please see our list of compliments

CommentsWe would like to hear your suggestions on how we could improve, so please let us know by making a comment or suggestion. Your ideas will be forwarded to the most appropriate person who will consider your suggested changes when they next review their service.

ComplaintsWe want you to complain if you feel you've been poorly or unfairly treated by any of our services and we will do our best to put things right when things have gone wrong.

You can make a compliment, comment or complaint about us or any of our services by completing the on-line Compliments, Comments and Complaints form, or you can write to us at Bolsover District Council, The Arc, High Street, Clowne, Derbyshire S43 4JY, or by calling into any one of our Contact Centres and asking one of our employees to put your complaint in writing for you.

If you are unhappy about a council service please contact the person or department you have been dealing with first. If you are unsure who to contact please telephone our Contact Centres on 01246 242424. We will try wherever possible to resolve the matter with you informally at that time (this is called frontline resolution). If the person you are dealing with is unable to do that they will offer you a call back from their line manager within 3 working days and/or advise you how to make a formal complaint (we call this a formal investigation).

If your complaint has been considered by us at the formal investigation stage and you remain dissatisfied with the outcome of that investigation and response, you can complete an Internal Review Complaint Form and your complaint will be reviewed by the Chief Executive Officer or an Executive Director.

However, if you are still not satisfied after you have fully completed our complaints procedure, then your next step would be to make a complaint in writing to the Local Government & Social Care Ombudsman or, in the case of housing matters, to your local Councillor, M.P. or the Housing Ombudsman Service. They will be able to provide you with advice on how to proceed further.

We are constantly striving to improve our service performance and we collate figures that detail the volumes of face to face and telephone enquiries that we have received at the Contact Centres for the period:

We became one of only a few nationally to achieve this standard at a corporate level, which was launched by the Government as part of its drive to improve customer service in the public sector. A surveillance visit by an independent assessor took place over two days and they concluded that ‘the authority is very customer focused and front line staff are their best advocates for this'...and 'overall performance is positive across nearly all of the sub-criterion and there are few areas of partial compliance'.

Customer Service Excellence (formerly Charter Mark) is a practical tool for driving customer focused change. The Customer Service Excellence standard is designed to operate on three distinct levels:

As a driver of continuous improvement - by allowing organisations to self assess their capability, using the online self assessment tool.

As a skills development tool – by allowing individuals and teams to explore and acquire new skills in the area of customer focus, customer engagement, thus building capacity for delivering improved services.

As an independent validation of achievement – by allowing organisations to seek formal accreditation, demonstrate their competence, identify areas for improvement and celebrate success.

We have adopted Customer Service Standards on how we deal with customers by telephone, letter, face-to-face, email and other forms of communication. Our leaflet (1.7MB) explains our promise to customers together with a summary of our main standards.

Each year we set targets for our key customer service standards. This enables us to measure how we are performing against these important service standards. We also take part in Mystery Shopping and quality monitoring exercises to test our customer service and contact methods; the latest results can be viewed below:

In order to help you access the services we provide and help you understand the standards that you can expect from these services we have produced a set of 8 Customer Information Booklets which can be printed off on request. Each booklet has a number of inserts and you can view these by clicking on the appropriate links below.